(This article contains spoilers, and is written under the assumption that the reader has viewed the entire series of Hannibal)
“This is my becoming.”
With that phrase, we reached the moment when Will Graham became fully aware of his own descent into evil. It’s something that’s been building over all three seasons of the show, but in this second half, the Red Dragon arc, we see his complete refusal of Hannibal crumble into acceptance. It’s simultaneously a moment of catharsis and defeat. Will tried to stay away from Hannibal and commit to a family, but it was never in the cards. Bedelia tells him in the finale that he’s found his religion, but in truth Will found it a long time ago. His transformation was almost complete; he just needed to consciously give himself over to his darker impulses.
The theme of transformation has been a major focus in Hannibal for some time, but is even more central in this arc. For one, the story they are adapting about the Red Dragon is explicitly about a man becoming something else altogether. For Francis Dolarhyde, the Dragon gives him power, but it also makes him a slave to its own desires. Despite being a relatively faithful adaptation of the source material, Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon, the parallels between Dolarhyde and the TV show’s version of Graham are illuminating. Both are men who are becoming more powerful and dangerous against their conscious wills, and both have people that they love (Will’s family, and Francis’ blind lover Reba) who are bound to fall victim to their darker predilections.
As an adaptation, the things that Fuller and his writers kept in tact are just as relevant as the things that they changed. In many cases, instead of changing elements entirely, the show simply moved them around to surprise viewers. The most successful example of this came when Dolarhyde attacked Will’s family with two episodes left to go. While Dolarhyde’s targeting of Will’s family is well-known in the books, having it be an actual tangible threat raises the dramatic stakes and makes Will’s team-up with the Dragon more disturbing.
Speaking of which, the alteration in Dolarhyde’s actions after faking his death greatly improve upon the source material. In the book, it’s simply an excuse for an exciting end scene, but here, it’s used to show how completely Will has transformed into Hannibal. While Dolarhyde thinks that he’s forcing Will into offering him Hannibal, for Will, it’s a win-win situation. He may not know exactly what will happen by pitting the killers against each other, but it’s likely to work out in his favor. Will is also beginning to develop a level of curiosity about his experiments. Just as Hannibal continually pushed Will to the brink of insanity in the first season, Will is now willing to create dangerous scenarios just to see what will happen.
But more than anything else, it is Will’s acceptance of his love for Hannibal, whether it be purely platonic or more overtly romantic, that completes his transformation. As they dispatch the Red Dragon together, they end in a bloody embrace, with Will’s admission that it was “beautiful.” Neither man is incapable of pushing the other into harm’s way for their own amusement, but neither can simply leave the other to die. When Will throws Hannibal and himself off of the cliff at the end, it does not seem to be a dying act of vengeance so much as a decision to end his life with the only person who truly understood him.
About that ending: Bryan Fuller says that this was going to be the ending of season 3, regardless of whether they had been picked up for season 4. Despite the finality of its ending, I would be extremely interested to see what direction he took the show in for future episodes. Given the possibilities of crowd-funding and the number of burgeoning online platforms, the idea of another movie or miniseries isn’t a pipe dream. But if none comes to fruition, this is as strong an ending as Hannibal could have had.